]]>The intelligence and intensity of Dorothy Thompson, which made her so successful as a reporter, could be nearly overwhelming in person. She attracted a great many admirers for her work—and for her personality. Post writer Jack Alexander tried to capture some of the force of her character in a 1940 article.

Great as her gifts, objectivity toward herself has never been one of them. She is one of the most extroverted of humans, aggressively gregarious and tireless in debate. For combined intellectual, physical, and emotional energy, she has no known equal, male or female.

Miss Thompson is statuesque and handsome. She is a master of the dramatic entrance and immediately makes herself the center of attention whenever she enters a roomful of people. It works unfailingly, whether the occasion is a birthday party for someone else, a cocktail soiree, or a christening. Women who go to the same social affairs begin by being annoyed and wind up sitting things out in a cold fury. The men surround miss Thompson and hang on her words.

It was inevitable that such a woman would find a determined admirer. In her case, the admirer was the Nobel-winning author, Sinclair Lewis. He first saw her in Berlin while he was on a book tour of Europe. With one look, he cancelled his tour and begged a friend to introduce him to Ms. Thompson at dinner that night.

Thus began one of the strangest of courtships. During the supper, Lewis’ eyes hardly left his hostess, and after the table had been cleared he maneuvered her into a corner and asked point-blank whether she would marry him.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I want to build a lovely house in Vermont and you are the only person I ever met that I wanted to share it with,” Lewis replied.

“That isn’t a good enough reason, but thank you very much—especially for asking me on this particular day,” Miss Thompson said. [It was both Ms. Thompson’s birthday and the day her divorce became official.]

Lewis said that his own divorce was not final as yet, but added, “I’m going to propose to you every time I see you, and from now on, in public and in private.”

Dorothy Thompson, newspaper columnist recently returned from Europe, calls on President Roosevelt at the White House.

Two days later his publisher arrived in Berlin and gave a public dinner in Lewis’ honor. Lewis insisted that Miss Thompson attend too. When called upon for a speech, the novelist arose and, ignoring everything else, faced her.

“Dorothy,” he said, “will you marry me?” That was all there was to the speech.

Rioting broke out in Vienna a few days later and Miss Thompson left for Tempelhof airdrome to charter an airplane. Lewis, getting wind of her departure, taxicabbed after her. He hated airplanes and had never ridden in one, but he jumped in alongside her. “Marry me, Dorothy, will you?” he asked. Frances Gunther, the wife of John Gunther, who had come to see Miss Thompson off, was pressed into service as a chaperone, and the ship took off with Lewis grimly holding on to the armrests.

A low-hanging fog made visibility almost zero and for a couple of hours the plane yawed and groaned over roofs and treetops, then turned back to Tempelhof to wait for better weather. Lewis’ normally ruddy face showed signs of paleness, but he was aboard when the plane departed again. At the Vienna airport Miss Thompson bolted away in a cab and Lewis pursued her in another.

During the week that disorders lasted, Lewis proposed several times a day. Miss Thompson told him that she would consider his request if he wrote his own impressions of the riots for the Public Ledger syndicate. He did, at space rates.

In the fall, Miss Thompson slipped out of Berlin and flew to Moscow to cover the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevist revolution. The love-and-air-sick novelist flew after her. Lewis, whose interest in the Russian experiment was nil, was nevertheless rated a great man in the Soviet Union, where his novels were widely read in translation. News of his flight had preceded him and a delegation of notables met him at the air field with a brass band.

The band played a welcoming hymn. The chairman of the committee delivered an address of greeting. Then, perhaps in the hope of evoking a plug for the anniversary, he asked the author why he had come to Moscow.

“To see Dorothy,” was the reply.

The chairman, puzzled, asked him again.

“Dorothy,” Lewis explained, “just Dorothy.”

During the celebration, the Russians never did get to understand Lewis, and he wasn’t interested in understanding them. But the trip was a success for him. He got in dozens of proposals in Red Square when the tanks passing in review weren’t making too much noise.

Dorothy Thompson at a dinner party.

In March, 1928, Miss Thompson gave up her job in Berlin, preparatory to her marriage to Lewis in the Savoy Chapel, in London. For a honeymoon, they toured the English countryside in an automobile trailer which Lewis had bought in a moment of whimsey. Trailers were an American oddity at the time, and everywhere the honeymooners went they aroused the curiosity of the simple natives.

Afterward, they lived a helter-skelter life. Lewis bought a farm in Vermont and a house in Bronxville, and when they weren’t living in one of these places they were traveling about Europe. Dorothy bore a son, Michael, who, in the fullness of time, learned to defeat her in argument, which is more than anyone else has succeeded in doing, and to put castor oil in her company cocktail shaker.

The movie inspired by Dorothy Thompson’s career, “Woman of the Year,” concerned a pair of writers juggling their careers and their marriage. The movie was successful partly because of the chemistry between Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and partly because the writer didn’t try to write a script as unbelievable as the true-life courtship of Thompson and Lewis.

]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2011/07/13/history/post-perspective/woman.html/feed3The Real Woman of the Yearhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2011/07/09/history/post-perspective/woman-2.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2011/07/09/history/post-perspective/woman-2.html#commentsSat, 09 Jul 2011 13:58:58 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=35705Dorothy Thompson, according to author John Gunther, was, "The best reporter this generation has seen in any country, and that is not saying nearly enough."

]]>Nobody had to tell Americans in 1942 who the “Woman of the Year” really was. The main character in that movie, played by Katherine Hepburn, was a star reporter known for her determination, independence, and an immense knowledge of world affairs. Who else could it be but Dorothy Thompson?

Well before the war started, Ms. Thompson had built an international reputation out of hard work and a readiness to go to any story. One evening in 1926, for example, as she entered the Vienna opera house, she overheard someone talking about a coup d’état in Poland. Telephoning an associate, she learned there was truth to the rumor. She instantly left the theater, grabbed a suitcase of clothes, borrowed $500 cash from her friend Sigmund Freud, and boarded the last train to Warsaw. When the train was stopped 50 miles outside the city, Ms. Thompson and another correspondent flagged down an automobile, which took them within five miles of the city. From there, she continued on in darkness, dragging herself and her suitcase across muddy fields to avoid militia patrols. Arriving in the city, she was refused entry to her hotel and so headed to the American Embassy, stepping across dead bodies in the streets. After writing her story, she was told that all telegraph offices had been closed by the government. She immediately hired another car and drove far out into the country. She eventually found a telegraph station that hadn’t heard the order to shut down, from which she filed her story.

This sort of determination earned her a posting to Berlin in 1927, from where she watched Adolf Hitler’s rise from beer-hall demagogue to chancellor of Germany. In 1933, she wrote an article for the Post that analyzed how Hitler won a free election to become head of state. Much of his success, she stated, was his blatant appeal to “fear, hatred, envy and above all, ignorance.”

This much was obvious after the war, but it was still rare in the 1930s when many people were undecided about Hitler. Some saw him as a viable leader for his country, a man who could restore stability to Germany and oppose communism. Ms. Thompson wasn’t buying any of this wishful thinking. In her reporting of the Nazis’ assumption of power, she proved to be one of the very few who saw what was coming.

The German people have not had Mr. Hitler thrust upon them. He recommended himself to them and they bought him. More than 50 per cent of all Germans politically minded enough to exercise the right of suffrage—and nearly 89 percent of them went to the polls—deliberately gave away all their civil rights, all their chances of popular control, all their opportunities for representation. The German people went over to autocracy in March, 1933, in a body, burning all their bridges behind them.

That the vote came as a shock to most English and Americans is due to a couple of illusions fondly and incurably cherished by people whose tradition is largely Anglo-Saxon. One is the illusion that all peoples love liberty, and that political liberty and some form of representative government are indivisible. The other is that peoples are less aggressive than their rulers. For, essentially, in 1933,the German people voted to fight; to fight the war all over again if need be.

In a few days Hitler and his private army changed the whole form of political life in Germany.

Storm troops of Hitler were in possession of the streets. And in the days following the election, the streets of every municipality presented in a curious aspect. Germany had suddenly got into uniform. A strange deadness seemed to come over commercial life, but in the streets a mass moved constantly—a marching mass, with banners, with bands and with uniforms.

No whisper leaked out in the Berlin press of what was happening under the Third Reich. Hitler, still speaking night after night, talked of brotherly love and German unity to cheering masses. But his adjutant, Goering, master of Prussia’s police, made no secret of the government’s intention to exterminate everyone who showed hostility to the regime. “ I waste no sympathy over the eighty or hundred thousand traitors under arrest,” he said in a speech—and the public learned for the first time the possible extent of the government’s roundup.

Dorothy Thompson in 1920

Many journalists continued reporting from Germany throughout the 1930s, but only because they carefully avoided reporting anything that would offend Hitler. Ms. Thompson wasn’t interested in tact or compromise. So, in 1934, the Gestapo marched her out of the country, making her the first reporter deported from Germany.

It was hardly the end of her career. Back in the U.S., she continued reporting and began broadcasting her analysis of the news. By 1942, Time magazine reported that she was one of the most admired woman in the country, second only to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Ms. Thompson would have turned 118 years old this Saturday, and while you and I might think that an advanced age, she didn’t. She told a Post writer in 1940:

She feels cramped by the limitations of an ordinary lifetime and often speculates on how nice it would be to live two or three hundred years. To someone who once asked her what epitaph she would like, she replied, “Died of extreme old age.”